Demon Bound

wire. The essential tools of Jack Winter, exorcist. Much different than Jack Winter, wrung-out junkie, and much preferable. It gave him something to think about other than the demon’s bargain. He was good at exorcisms, sure of them and himself when he was performing them. If he could solve Naughton’s poxy problem and get Pete some cash in the doing, so much the better.
    “Cleansing will take an hour or so,” he told Pete when she came to the door and propped herself against the jamb by her shoulder, watching him lay out his kit. “Got to find a setup spot where the poltergeist can’t fling any crockery at me head.”
    “I’m going to look in Danny’s room in the meantime,” she said. “See if there’s anything Nick missed.”
    “Might be a good spot,” Jack decided.
Nick.
Christ on a bike. Nothing but bloody Nick. “Close to but not too close to where he kicked off.” Setting up a cleansing on a suicide’s last breathing spot was just asking to have your lungs ripped through your nose by an angry spirit.
    Jack gathered his tools and followed Pete to Danny’s room, a large back bedroom that looked out on the rotting, soggy gardens. The rain lashed down in earnest outside, and wind crawled under the slanted eaves of the Naughton house, moaning low and lost. Day outside darkened to the half-night of storms and dreams.
    Jack wiggled his eyebrows at Pete when a bad gust rattled the windows. “How apropos. Always did like a bit of mood weather.”
    Now, with the job, he could put the
cu sith
and the ghosts in Paddington out of his mind. At least for the few moments it took to cleanse Danny’s sad, wandering spirit.
    The room Danny Naughton had chosen was worse than Jack’s own flat, if that were possible—the peeling plaster and warped floors, the chipped war-era furniture, all attached to a crumbling en suite equipped with the sort of plumbing American comedians cracked jokes about.
    The bed was stripped bare, a stained mattress the only sign anyone had recently slept atop it. Drawers stood half open, clothes trailing out and across the floor like shed skin. Nancy Nick had been in a whirlwind hurry to get out of the place after Danny hung himself, Jack thought. That or he’d been keen to erase evidence of something before the emergency crew showed themselves. Jack’d cleaned up enough mates who’d overdosed to know the signs.
    A massive mirror opposite the bed was covered with a sheet, and Pete moved to snatch it off. Jack stopped her with a hand up.
    “Leave it. Mirrors could let something watch us that we don’t want.”
    Pete frowned. “Do you think he knew? Danny? That this place was off?”
    Jack kicked an empty plastic bottle, and it rolled to join three more fellows under the bed. “I think he liked his vodka cheap and by the quart.”
    Pete examined the empty closet, jangling wire hangers the only residents. She was methodical, sifting through the detritus atop the dresser and each drawer with quick, professional fingers. Jack could imagine her in a pants suit and blue nitrile gloves, standing in this same room while white-suited crime scene technicians moved around her like explorers on a foreign moon.
    Her hair would be pulled back in the low, efficient ballerina twist she’d worn during her time at the Met. Her warrant card and badge clipped to her belt along with handcuffs and pepper spray. A low heel, nothing flashy or trampy, just enough to elevate her petite frame to eye level with the male detectives of the squad.
    “You’re staring at me,” Pete said. “Keep it up and I’m going to think I have something growing out of my forehead.”
    She wriggled the bedside drawer. “This one’s locked.”
    “Let me,” Jack said. He passed his fingers over the lock, and then pulled his ring of skeleton keys from his leather. They wore an enchantment, just the smallest charm to conduct a spell. Jack found them years ago at a bazaar in Leeds, mixed in with a box of mundane junk. He sometimes wondered about the mage who’d lost such a valuable tool, but not often.
    Jack stuck the smallest key into the lock and whispered the words inscribed around the hilt and down the shaft of each skeleton key.
    There was a click and the drawer popped open, over-flowing with small squares of paper.
    “You should teach me that one,” Pete said.
    “You wouldn’t want it,” Jack said. Pete took a handful of the slips and shuffled through them.
    “Wouldn’t I?”
    “Lockpicking is